1984

PART ONE. # Chapter 1. ## Setting the Scene. - The story begins on a cold day in April with clocks striking thirteen, introducing Winston Smith as he enters Victory Mansions, escaping a harsh wind. - The hallway reeks of boiled cabbage and old rag mats, highlighting a sense of decay and poverty. ## The Enormous Face. - A large poster of a man with a black moustache, around forty-five years old, is prominently displayed, with the caption "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU". - This image is omnipresent, designed to make people feel constantly observed. ## The Telescreen. - Inside Winston's flat, a "fruity voice" emanates from a telescreen, an instrument that cannot be completely turned off. - The telescreen transmits and receives simultaneously. - It is capable of picking up any sound louder than a low whisper, and can also see any movement within range. ## Winston's Appearance. - Winston is described as a smallish, frail figure, his thinness emphasized by the blue overalls of the Party uniform. - He is thirty-nine years old with a varicose ulcer above his right ankle. ## Airstrip One. - The city outside looks cold and colorless, except for the ubiquitous posters. - London is referred to as the chief city of Airstrip One, which itself is the third most populous province of Oceania. ## The Ministry of Truth. - The Ministry of Truth (Minitrue in Newspeak) is described as an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, 300 metres into the air. - Its stark contrast with the surrounding decay is striking. - The three slogans of the Party are displayed on its face: "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH". ## The Four Ministries. - There are three other buildings similar in appearance and size to the Ministry of Truth. - These are the homes of the four Ministries that divide the apparatus of government: the Ministry of Peace (Minipax), concerned with war; the Ministry of Love (Miniluv), maintaining law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty), responsible for economic affairs. ## The Ministry of Love. - The Ministry of Love is particularly frightening due to its lack of windows and the fact that entry is nearly impossible. Winston has never been inside nor even within half a kilometre of it. ## Victory Gin and Cigarettes. - Winston prepares to consume Victory Gin to brace himself for the day. - Victory Gin is a colourless liquid with a sickly, oily smell, reminiscent of Chinese rice-spirit. - He pours a teacupful and gulps it down, reacting strongly to its harsh taste, comparing it to nitric acid and a rubber club to the head. - He attempts to smoke a Victory Cigarette, but the tobacco falls out, highlighting the poor quality of goods available. ## The Diary. - Winston sits in an alcove, out of sight of the telescreen, and prepares to write in a blank book he had acquired from a junk shop. - Even with nothing written in it, possession of this book is a compromising act. - Writing in a diary carries the potential punishment of death or twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. ## April 4th, 1984. - Winston writes the date, though he is not entirely sure of the year. - He is overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness, wondering for whom he is writing. ## Doublethink. - The concept of DOUBLETHINK is introduced, where one holds two contradictory ideas simultaneously. - It is a Newspeak word that Winston's mind bumps against, realizing the impossibility of communicating with the future. ## Lost Power of Expression. - Winston has lost the power of expressing himself, even forgetting what he intended to say, illustrating the Party's control over thought and communication. ## War Films. - Winston begins writing about a recent trip to the flicks where he saw war films. - In one, a ship full of refugees is bombed: the audience is amused by the graphic deaths. - Another shot depicts a lifeboat full of children being bombed. ## The Prole Woman. - During the film, a woman in the "prole" part of the audience protests against showing such violence in front of children, indicating the proles' capacity for empathy and compassion. # Chapter 2. ## Mrs. Parsons' Kitchen Sink. - Winston is interrupted by Mrs. Parsons, his neighbour, who needs help with her blocked kitchen sink. - He goes to their flat, which is described as dingy and battered. ## The Parsons' Children. - The Parsons children, dressed as Spies, charge into the room, accusing Winston of being a traitor and thought-criminal. - Their behaviour is frightening, displaying a calculating ferocity and desire to harm Winston. ## Hanging. - Mrs. Parsons mentions that the children are upset because they cannot see the hanging of Eurasian prisoners. - This emphasizes the desensitization of children to violence and the Party's control over their desires. ## Goldstein. - After he leaves their flat, one of the children hits Winston in the neck with a catapult and yells "Goldstein!" - This illustrates the level of indoctrination, even in children. ## The Times. - Back in his flat, Winston reflects on Mrs. Parsons' terror and the horrible nature of children turned into ungovernable savages by the Spies organization. - The Times often carries stories of children denouncing their parents to the Thought Police. ## O'Brien Dream. - Years ago, Winston had dreamed of someone saying, "We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness", a statement that he had since associated with O'Brien. - Winston is unsure whether O'Brien is a friend or an enemy, but feels a link of understanding between them. ## Ration Cut. - A newsflash announces a glorious victory on the Malabar front, but follows with the announcement that the chocolate ration will be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty ($30 \rightarrow 20$). - The gin is wearing off, leaving Winston with a deflated feeling. ## Ingsoc. - Winston walks over to the window and reflects on INGSOC, Newspeak, and doublethink. - He feels alone in a monstrous world, uncertain if anyone is on his side. ## Thoughtcrime. - Winston reflects on how he is already dead due to his Thoughtcrime. - Thoughtcrime cannot be concealed forever. ## Arrest at Night. - Winston envisions the future, thinking how they'll invariably arrest you at night. # Chapter 3. ## Winstons Dream. - Winston dreams of his mother and sister sacrificing themselves for him. - In this dream, Winston is aware that he is out in the light and air, while they are being sucked down to death. - The dream also makes him realize that tragedies like his mother's death, built on love and loyalty, are no longer possible. ## Tragedy. - Winston's mind comes to focus on the fact that tragedies can't happen in Oceania anymore. - As such, Winston believes his mother loved him as he was too young to love her back and that she had sacrificed herself to a concept of loyalty that was private and unalterable. ## Golden Country. - Winston has a dream of the Golden Country. - The Golden Country is a rabbit-bitten pasture that is swaying in the breeze as a clear slow-moving stream moves nearby. ## Whistle. - The telescreen is giving off an ear-splitting whistle. # Chapter 4. ## The Memory Hole. - Winston pulls the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece, and put on his spectacles. - Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. - In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. - To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages. - To the left, a larger one for newspapers. - In the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. - This last was for the disposal of waste paper. - Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. - For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. ## The Messages. - Winston examined the four slips of paper which he had unrolled. - Each contained a message of only one or two lines, in the abbreviated jargon. - They ran: - times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify - times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue - times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify - times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling ## Big Brother. - For example, it appeared from ‘The Times’ of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. ## Alter. - The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. ## Statistics. - The fact that a great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. ## Reality Shadow World. - Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. - All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. - And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain. ## People in the Records Department Did Not Readily Talk About Their Jobs. - The people in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. - People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. - He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. ## Newspeak. - His exploits had been gradually pushed backwards in time until already they extended into the fabulous world of the forties and the thirties, when the capitalists in their strange cylindrical hats still rode through the streets of London in great gleaming motor-cars or horse carriages with glass sides. ## Smith W. - Smith! screamed the shrewish voice from the telescreen. - 6079 Smith W.! Yes, YOU! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You’re not trying. Lower, please! THAT’S better, comrade. Now stand at ease, the whole squad, and watch me.’ # Chapter 5. ## Friends. - You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades. - Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. - A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme. ## Execute. - In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. ## Nex’, Please! - ‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle. - Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. - On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch—a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet. ## Table. - 'There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said Syme. - Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’ - The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. - They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table. ## Wasteage. - It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. ## Smaller Everyday. - Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’. ## Not human beings. - The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. - By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. ## Unconciousness. - Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’ ## Parsons. - 'Here comes Parsons,’ he said. - Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions: a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. ## Our New Happy Life. - The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ recurred several times. - It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. ## Swallowed that. - Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. - Syme, too—in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory? ## Memory. - Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory? - The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel,more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies—more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. # Chapter 6. ## Side-Street. - It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. - She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. - She had a young face, painted very thick. - It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. ## No Reason. - Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I—. - For the moment it was too difficult to go on. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against them, trying to squeeze out the vision that kept recurring. He had an almost overwhelming temptation to shout a string of filthy words at the top of his voice. Or to bang his head against the wall, to kick over the table, and hurl the inkpot through the window—to do any violent or noisy or painful thing that might black out the memory that was tormenting him. ## Briefcase. - They were a few metres apart when the left side of the man’s face was suddenly contorted by a sort of spasm. - It happened again just as they were passing one another: it was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. ## Nervous. - What was frightening was that the action was quite possibly unconscious. - The most deadly danger of all was talking in your sleep. - There was no way of guarding against that, so far as he could see. - He drew his breath and went on writing. ## Basement Kitchen. - I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. - There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. ## Bugs. - He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so. - Only the proles used scent. In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication. ## Forbidden. - Consorting with prostitutes was forbidden, of course, but it was one of those rules that you could occasionally nerve yourself to break. - It was dangerous, but it was not a life-and-death matter. To be caught with a prostitute might mean five years in a forced-labour camp: not more, if you had committed no other offence. ## Party Purpose. - Tacitly the Party was even inclined to encourage prostitution, as an outlet for instincts which could not be altogether suppressed. - Mere debauchery did not matter very much, so long as it was furtive and joyless and only involved the women of a submerged and despised class. - The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members. The woman did not take to this kindly. But as soon as she heard that he was married she became much more friendly and said that she wouldn’t have done what she did if she had known that beforehand. She said most Party members didn’t get married before they were thirty. Marriage was always supposed to postpone sexual desires, and if you did commit fornication it was looked on as a kind of duty to confess it. # Chapter 7. ## The Proles. - ‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’ - If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. ## No Way. - The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. - Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. ## The Most. - Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. - But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. ## Riot. - He remembered how once he had been walking down a crowded street when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices -women’s voices -had burst from a side-street a little way ahead. - It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh!’ that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It's started! he had thought. A riot! - The proles are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round the stalls of a street market, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. ## Rubish. - All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working-hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. 34. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed-no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull. # Chapter 8. ## Roasting Coffee. - From somewhere at the bottom of a passage the smell of roasting coffee—real coffee, not Victory Coffee—came floating out into the street.## No Spare Time. - The Community Centre: a rash act, since you could be certain that the number of your attendances at the Centre was carefully checked. In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. ## Ratholes. - The houses with battered doorways which gave straight on the pavement and which were somehow curiously suggestive of ratholes.. there were puddles of filthy water here and there among the cobbles. In and out of the dark doorways, and down narrow alley-ways that branched off on either side, people swarmed in astonishing numbers. ## Steamer. - ‘Steamer’ was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. ## No Number Ending in Seven. - The Lottery. There were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal. If not the only reason for remaining alive. ## Ingsoc. - Down in the street the word INGSOC fitfully appeared and vanished. Ingsoc. As though as the monster in a forest by wandering near it lost. The scared mind made it more intense by the fear. ## Dreamed. - I Have Dreamed that O'Brien might be a conspirator of the brotherhood. That's a voice spoken to him out of the dark, said. Winston did not know what it meant, only that in some way or another it would come true. ## 3 -10 Minutes. - Winston had to be back at work by fourteen-thirty -so Winston felt he was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. - It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage. ## Dead, he reflected. - HE seemed to HIM that HE had BEEN to formulates HIS thoughts, that HE HAD taken the decisive step. He wrote. - IN two fingers OF HIS right HAND, WAS INK STAINED . It WAS to BETRAY you EXACTLY OF THE kind THAT might. # Chapter 9. ## Wrote. - ‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’ ## Voices. - and then: and with a very much the time has since long. - Then what you don't see what is about the way? Is I were to. ## Dream. - He had dreamed of someone saying out through-a- pitch dark room. Walking. # PART TWO